Graduate Student Drexel University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Values clarification, a component of mindfulness and acceptance based treatment (MABT), is a skill taught to identify ideas, guiding principles, or domains (that is, values) that are important to an individual. Bringing awareness to a person’s values has been shown to increase motivation to engage in a range of health behaviors, such as exercise and healthy eating. Motivation can be classified on a spectrum; forms of motivation include amotivation, an absence of motivation to engage in a behavior, external motivation, engaging in a behavior to receive a reward or avoid negative consequences, introjected regulation, engaging in a behavior to avoid feeling guilt or increase one’s sense of self-worth, and autonomous motivation, engaging in a behavior that is consistent with one’s intrinsic goals or outcomes (that is, an individual feels a sense of choice, in addition to interest in and satisfaction with the behavior). Prior research has found that an increase in autonomous motivation is correlated to improved self-regulation and predicts greater engagement in health behaviors, thus making it an important target for interventions. Values clarification may increase autonomous motivation by helping individuals match health behaviors to personally defined values, causing these behaviors to be perceived as more self-determined and consistent with one's intrinsic goals. This current study is one of the first to examine the effects of values clarification/awareness training on autonomous and controlled motivation in the context of behavioral weight loss treatment. This study used data from a larger randomized controlled trial in which participants (N = 288) were assigned to one of eight treatment conditions (in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design) for 12 months. Each condition contained a combination of standard behavioral weight loss treatment and one or more components of MABT: mindful awareness, mindful acceptance, and values awareness. We hypothesized that autonomous motivation would be higher and amotivation, external regulation, and introjected regulation would be lower in the values on conditions. Contrary to our hypotheses, independent samples t-tests demonstrated that participants in the values on and values off conditions had no significant differences in autonomous motivation, external motivation, or amotivation at mid-treatment or post-treatment (all ps > .05). Furthermore, participants in the values on conditions endorsed greater introjected regulation compared to participants in the values off conditions at mid-treatment (t(251) = -1.80, p = .04, d = -.23) and post-treatment (t(229) = -1.67, p = .05, d = -.22), and greater external motivation at post-treatment (t(229) = -2.02, p = .02, d = -.27). These results suggest that the values clarification/awareness training increased controlled motivation but not autonomous motivation for weight loss behaviors. Future directions for research include a) determining if these changes in treatment motivation mediate changes in weight and b) examining the acceptability of values clarification/awareness training in behavioral weight loss treatment.
